Multiracial

IF THE NEW Betty Crocker, unveiled this spring by General Mills, were a real person, the U.S. Census Bureau wouldn't know what to do with her.It doesn't know what to do about millions of other Americans who don't fit neatly into the arbitrary categories the Census Bureau continues to use. And time is running out to bring the once-a-decade head count into sync with today's racial realities.Betty Crocker is no longer depicted as a white suburban mom. She has grown less matronly and more businesslike as General Mills has updated her image repeatedly.

THE OTHER night, an MCI operator called from New Mexico. In the course of haranguing me about the value of switching long-distance calling plans, the topic turned to race, as it frequently does in my conversations.The operator thought I -- an African American -- was white, I thought he was Jewish. When I discovered that he was born of a Mexican/Anglo union, I asked him how he identified racially."I don't believe in racial classifications," he swiftly replied in a defensive tone, suggesting that I wasn't progressive.

When Vicky Key looks at Barack Obama, she sees someone like her - not black, not white, but mixed. "I feel for him," says Key, 20, a sophomore at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is active in the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association. "Because of being mixed, the issue comes up of if he is trying to be black or white. I face that challenge every day. People look at you and judge you by how you look." As products of mixed-race marriages, Obama and Key are in a what appears to be a fast-growing segment of the American population.

Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown became the first candidate to join the 2014 Maryland governor's race Friday with a call to close the gap between rich and poor in education, health and economic opportunity. Before a crowd at Prince George's Community College that organizers estimated at 2,500, the Democrat outlined priorities that could have come straight out of the playbook of Gov. Martin O'Malley, Brown's term-limited partner in Annapolis. Brown is the first candidate, Democrat or Republican, to formally announce his candidacy, and he did so in uncompromisingly liberal terms - pledging to maintain Maryland's No. 1-ranked school system, to keep college tuition low and to invest aggressively in infrastructure and career training.

WHEN LUKE A. SHAW was a year old, his brother, left home to care for his little sibling, secured him with a belt in a tiny rocking chair by the fire place. Shaw rocked and rocked, until he pitched forward into the fire's dying embers. He landed on his forehead and hands. His sister and brother retrieved him, and his mother came home in time to find the flesh melting from his fingers.Three years later, Shaw remembers, there was a train ride and the consoling Baby Ruth candy bars his father plied him with as they traveled from their rural North Carolina home to the hospital in Gastonia.

The governor is vetoing bills that would have forced HMOs to pay for more visits to emergency rooms and allowed Marylanders to identify themselves as "multiracial" on government forms.Those were among 11 vetoes announced yesterday by Gov. Parris N. Glendening in letters to the legislature.The governor described his decision to veto the health maintenance organization bill as "a most difficult one because the bill is an attempt to balance the interests, sometimes competing, of the major elements in our health care delivery system."

WASHINGTON -- An enormous number of people -- perhaps you -- are descended, albeit very indirectly, from Charlemagne.And an enormous number are descended from Charlemagne's groom.Trace your pedigree back far enough, you may find that you are an omelet of surprising ingredients.Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Jesse Owens and Roy Campanella each had a white parent. Martin Luther King (who had an Irish grandmother, and some Indian ancestry), W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X had some Caucasian ancestry.

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one, with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. - the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Dec. 11, 1961 Tom Watson, memorialized with a statue on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol, is remembered for a virulent racism that denigrated Catholics, demonized Jews and lauded a Ku Klux Klan that would terrorize former slaves. But Mr. Watson didn't start his political career as a hatemonger.

Dutch Ruppersberger looks at his morning newspaper and thinks he's read this story before. It's about the great American edginess, called racial integration. He remembers the story from three decades ago. Only, last time, it was happening in the city where he lived. Now it's happening in the county he leads.The morning paper says that Baltimore County's minority population, which was 3.5 percent 25 years ago, and 15 percent just five years ago, will be 30 percent by the year 2005. The great suburban migration, it turns out, is multiracial.

WASHINGTON - I guess all of that national unity and good feeling that followed the tragedies of Sept. 11 was just too good to last. A planned memorial to honor the 343 firefighters who died at the World Trade Center has sparked a firestorm of its own. Let's just say that some people don't like the way it re-colors history. The proposed 19-foot bronze statue is based on the now-famous news photo of three firemen raising an American flag over the rubble at Ground Zero. Except, instead of the three firemen in the photo, who are all white, the statue depicts one white, one black and one Hispanic.